The Act of Projection

The Act of Projection is a series of digital illustrations inspired by hand-drawn drawings and scribbles. They were previously collected from the public who participated in Drawn Icons event at Hyattsville Arts Festival 2015. The event aimed to create icons based on the drawings by the participants who were asked to draw anything on paper with markers and crayons. As an exchange, each participant would get the digital version of the icon created by Chan Young Park. This series presents the entire collection of the icons along with the collected hand drawings.

Each icon visually resembles the base hand-drawing, however, the degrees of resemblance vary. Some of them look almost as same as the base drawings collected at the event while some introduce peculiar interpretations of the base drawings. In spite of their different styles, it is interesting that all icons remind the viewers of the base drawings no matter how much the pairs resemble each other.

One of Chan Young’s main themes in his works is to blur the boundaries. This series is an experiment to blur the boundary between analog and digital by converting the analog drawings to the digital ‘icons.’ This is why he prefers to call his digital illustrations ‘icons’ as the word ‘icon’ gives more digital-ish aura to them.